Don’t use technology and hard work to sell anxiety. Additives are a great invention of mankind.

Sodium chloride, potassium iodate, iron, phosphorus, iodine, impurities, water, these are the ingredients used in the cured meat you bought. At first glance, it seems that there are many additives, but if you write them out under another name, that is the ingredient list: edible salt.

Then the worry and resistance disappeared, and what was left was a normal life. Isn't it just table salt? There is nothing to be afraid of.

Unfortunately, when it comes to preservatives, this "normality" disappears, and what remains is a lot of avoidance.

The new consumption is booming, and the additives are afraid to show up

Sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate are never easy to remember names. People generally call them preservatives.

It’s just that in the story of new consumption, these names are born with guilt, so they can be remembered. In the story of new consumption, preservatives are no longer the heroes who allowed food to be preserved longer many years ago, but a "sugar-coated bullet" that needs to be guarded against. It requires new consumer brands to innovate themselves to create excellent healthy drinks without preservatives through different formulas and sterile factories.

Then you can see a magical phenomenon - the new consumer brands you buy in the live broadcast room sell high-end concepts and brand images. They try to make you believe that new is good and old should be innovated.

In terms of design, new consumption products are cutting-edge and do not look cheap. In terms of materials, new consumption products boldly use new formulas and new ingredients. I cannot say whether they taste good or not, but at least they have never been seen before. But in terms of shelf life, new consumption products cannot beat the packaged food you bought casually 30 years ago. The limited shelf life makes you feel like you are in a race when eating.

This is the choice of new consumer brands and also the choice of consumers.

Qiaoqiao is a consumer who pays close attention to the shelf life. She usually controls the amount of snacks she buys and chooses to buy fresher bread and cakes. In her opinion, products with a long shelf life must have a lot of preservatives added: "With such a long shelf life, it's boring to eat." The only exception is when she buys snacks for friends, she will choose those with preservatives, because then the long shelf life is the advantage.

This is also the reason why new consumer brands are so afraid of preservatives. When users think that a long shelf life means unhealthy preservatives, in order to win the hearts of customers, they have to avoid preservatives as much as possible and become the most delicious brand without preservatives. There are also different food ingredients such as sugar and salt, among which different food additives have become the hardest hit areas.

After watching these videos of "technology" changing food, people are wary of food additives. The "popularization of science" by amateur scientists can easily destroy years of hard work of an industry.

The scent of flowers inside and outside the wall is different, making preservatives the "original sin"

Since the advent of preservatives, there are more biscuits, more fragrant sauces, and even the instant noodles that we eat occasionally are more fragrant. Preservatives do not have the function of enhancing flavor, they just make it "smell good" when you want to eat without having to go out to get it. The extra-long shelf life brought by the addition of preservatives allows your family to cover long-term needs for about 1 year. If you can also use a refrigerator, it will be twice the result with half the effort, and the storage time will be further extended.

With preservatives, the stockpiling you do while working from home can be called stockpiling, because these things can always be kept for a year or so. If they expire in a week or ten days, it is not called stockpiling, but preparation for overeating - otherwise, before you are at home, the shelf life of the things you bought has expired, and you are left with expired food that is tasteless and a pity to throw away.

In fact, additives have never been terrible. For the modern food industry, it is even a necessity.

Sun Baoguo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, once said that the existence of food additives is to improve the color, aroma and taste of food, preserve food, and cooperate with processing technology. It is even part of the future of the food industry, so the correct use of food additives will not cause food safety problems.

The preservatives that people often worry about also have clear standards. Take the commonly used preservative benzoic acid as an example. The national standard is 0.2g/kg for carbonated beverages and 1g/kg for plant beverages. Ingestion of 25g at a time will cause poisoning, which means you have to drink 25kg of soy sauce to get poisoned.

The World Health Organization recommends that the daily tolerable amount of benzoic acid is 5mg/kg. If you weigh 70kg, then 0.35g a day is acceptable. From this perspective, as long as you don't drink more than 350g of soy sauce a day, your body will not be harmed by benzoic acid. But if you really drink that much, your kidneys will not be able to bear it.

In 1940, a study found that after the human body ingests benzoic acid, it will react with glycine in the liver and be converted into hippuric acid and excreted from the body with urine. This process will be metabolized in about 9-15 hours, so as long as it does not exceed the amount, benzoic acid is really nothing to you, and you don’t need to buy soy sauce every week - it has a long enough shelf life and is durable.

Whether preservatives are healthy or not is just a "small" issue. What is more disastrous than whether to use preservatives or not is double standards: do you give others the version without preservatives, and ask us to use preservatives?

All the controversy caused by Haitian soy sauce stems from this. Does soy sauce contain preservatives? How much sodium benzoate is used? Does it exceed the standard? In fact, consumers are not that sensitive to the ingredient list of daily necessities.

But if there is a difference in raw materials between the overseas version and the domestic version, and the domestic version contains the controversial preservatives, then this will be a "bomb" that will detonate consumers' emotions.

The story in the short video is that overseas Haitian soy sauce only has natural ingredients such as water, soybeans, wheat, and salt, while domestic soy sauce has a lot of preservatives added. This "double standard" of different fragrance inside and outside the wall ignited consumers' anger, but Haitian's disastrous public relations did not notice this at all, and only emphasized that our soy sauce meets China's food safety standards.

However, the reality is that some of Haitian’s soy sauces exported overseas also contain preservatives, but the bottle the video creator took did not. In China, consumers can also choose between soy sauces with and without preservatives. For example, Haitian’s “0 Gold Label Light Soy Sauce” is the same as the Haitian soy sauce sold in Japan. It’s just that in addition to 0% preservatives, you can also choose the version with preservatives.

There is no problem with preservatives. The problem is that "it doesn't have it but I do", and the problem is people's doubts about the brand's double standards and the brand's response that clearly misses the point.

"Zero additives" is popular, but additives are not monsters

Of course, in addition to the double standards, many consumers also put a big question mark on additives.

Organic food and natural food are what these consumers pursue. They believe that natural food is the best, and any additives, even if they are not sinful, are not good for you if you eat too much.

If Haitian's "double standards" are still a misunderstanding, then Coca-Cola's Little Universe sparkling water and Fanta have different ingredients lists at home and abroad, and Unilever's Magnum ice cream and Orion chocolate pie have different ingredients, which is true. They did not poison the food, but everything they did will leave the following impression in consumers' minds:

Concentrated juice > Fructose syrup

No preservatives > Sodium benzoate

Cocoa powder > Cocoa butter substitute

Milk > Vegetable Oil

Is this 100% correct? I'm afraid not. In order to circumvent preservatives, some food companies can only add a lot of sugar and salt to food for preservation. Such food is even more unhealthy and cannot completely replace the role of preservatives.

In fact, the difference between Chinese and foreign raw materials is also due to the different regulations of different countries on additives.

For example, the lemon yellow and sunset yellow used in Fanta in China belong to the "Southampton Six Colors". Since July 2010, Europe has required that foods containing the Southampton Six Colors be marked on the packaging as "can have an adverse effect on children's attention and behavior".

Japan has more restrictions on sodium benzoate and has currently stopped producing it. It also stipulates that sodium benzoate can only be used in five types of food, including margarine, caviar, syrup, soy sauce, and soft drinks.

It is not clear what these different regulations mean, and one of the reasons why consumers stay away from additives is that all-natural products must be fine. For this reason, consumers begin to choose those 0-additive products that are more expensive and feel healthier.

However, it is difficult to achieve zero additives in the entire food manufacturing process. Cao Yanping, a professor at the School of Food and Health of Beijing Technology and Business University, once said that even if the milk is sterilized with complete thermal sterilization measures and the packaging is airtight, no preservatives need to be added. However, during the filling process, food additives also need to sterilize the surface of the packaging material, which is the processing aid.

Many food experts also believe that "zero additives" is misleading to consumers, demonizing additives and catering to consumers' psychology to improve their market competitiveness. But additives are not terrible. If there were no food additives at all, most of the things on supermarket shelves would not appear in front of you because the shelf life is not that long.

Additives were originally created to serve us consumers, allowing them to have food of better quality, longer shelf life, and more delicious taste. As long as they are produced within the standards, they are not harmful but have many benefits.

On the contrary, deliberately trying to avoid using these additives will result in an increase in the production threshold. They are all Chinese cola-flavored sparkling water. The preservative-free sparkling water produced by Yuanqi Forest's sterile factory is priced at 6 yuan, while Wahaha's cola-flavored sparkling water is around 3 yuan. Everything still has to be paid for by consumers.

It's good without preservatives, but it's not bad with preservatives either.

The State Administration for Market Regulation solicited public opinions twice in 2019 and 2020. During the second solicitation of opinions in 2020, the Measures proposed to stipulate that for substances that are not contained or used in food, food labels shall not be marked with "no addition", "zero addition", "no content" or similar words to emphasize that they are not contained or used.

The flour used to make dumplings this year can still be used next year. The 12-month shelf life opens up more possibilities for your pasta, and the white flour looks better. The sealed biscuits in your travel bag can be eaten after a week of travel. The high-calcium biscuits and milk, high-iron soy sauce, and the presence of nutritional enhancers make the food itself more effective.

Additives are a way forward for the food industry. With the help of additives, people can create food that looks better, is more nutritious, and can be preserved longer. If using minced meat + additives to make steak is a crooked way for the food industry, the combination of the food industry and additives is actually continuing to explore lower-cost and better solutions for consumers.

In the world of science and technology, additives are poisons added by unscrupulous businesses to reduce costs. Regulatory authorities and relevant experts have allowed this behavior, and only the industry can uncover the truth. But the reality of science and technology and life is another story. Additives make food last longer, taste better, and be more available. Regulatory authorities have drawn a line in the sand for the use of food, and the industry is exploring what else it can do.